Both of the questions are studied in first year MBA courses .They seem to make sense at a first glance, but I would try to show they are highly overrated questions.

The underlying assumption is that BBG (Big Big Giant) can use its amazing resources, huge capital , loyal customer base and brand to kill any small company if the small company does not have a great barrier to entry, which is typically a technological one.

Having worked in few BBG’s and couple of Start-Up I beg to differ. The giants tend to fail themselves.

StartUp Beats Big Big Giant Corporate

Lets start with some questions:

Why was Sun unable to succeed with its own firewall (SunScreen?) when it tried to stop OEM’ing Check Point’s?

Why is VMWARE leading over Microsoft in virtualization? Microsoft acquired Connectix in 2003. Connectix virtualization technology was almost as good as VMWARE’s at the time. Today there is a big gap in market share.

How come IBM , with years of building super computers does not have an elastic cloud solution?